Tech

A new economic study in the journal Science shows that thousands of farmers in northern India could increase their profits if they stop burning their rice straw and adopt no-till practices to grow wheat. Alternative farming practices could also cut farmers' greenhouse gas emissions from on-farm activities by as much as 78% and help lower air pollution in cities like New Delhi.

The new study compares the costs and benefits of 10 distinct land preparation and sowing practices for northern India's rice-wheat cropping rotations, which are spread across more than 4 million hectares. The direct seeding of wheat into unplowed soil and shredded rice residues was the best option -- it raises farmers' profits through higher yields and savings in labor, fuel, and machinery costs.

The study, conducted by a global team of eminent agriculture and environmental scientists, was led by researchers from The Nature Conservancy, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the Borlaug Institute for South Asia (BISA) and the University of Minnesota.

A burning issue

To quickly and cheaply clear their fields to sow wheat each year, farmers in northern India burn an estimated 23 million tons of straw from their rice harvests. That enormous mass of straw, if packed into 20-kilogram 38-centimeter-high bales and piled on top of each other, would reach a height of over 430,000 kilometers -- about 1.1 times the distance to the moon.
Regulations are in place in India to reduce agricultural fires but burning continues because of implementation challenges and lack of clarity about the profitability of alternate, no-burn farming.
Farmers have alternatives, the study shows. To sow wheat directly without plowing or burning rice straw, farmers need to purchase or rent a tractor-mounted implement known as the "Happy Seeder," as well as attach straw shedders to their rice harvesters. Leaving straw on the soil as a mulch helps capture and retain moisture and also improves soil quality, according to M.L. Jat, CIMMYT Principal Scientist, cropping systems specialist and a co-author of the study.

Win-win

The Science study demonstrates that it is possible to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is profitable to farmers and scalable.

The paper shows that Happy Seeder-based systems are on average 10%-20% more profitable than straw burning options.

"Our study dovetails with 2018 policies put in place by the government of India to stop farmers from burning, which includes a US$166 million subsidy to promote mechanization to manage crop residues within fields," said Priya Shyamsundar, Lead Economist, Global Science, of The Nature Conservancy and first author of the study.

Shyamsundar noted that relatively few Indian farmers currently sow their wheat using the Happy Seeder but manufacturing of the Seeder had increased in recent years. "Less than a quarter of the total subsidy would pay for widespread adoption of the Happy Seeder, if aided by government and NGO support to build farmer awareness and impede burning."

"With a rising population of 1.6 billion people, South Asia hosts 40% of the world's poor and malnourished on just 2.4% of its land," said Jat, who recently received India's prestigious Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Award for outstanding and impact-oriented research contributions in natural resource management and agricultural engineering. "Better practices can help farmers adapt to warmer winters and extreme, erratic weather events such as droughts and floods, which are having a terrible impact on agriculture and livelihoods. In addition, India's efforts to transition to more sustainable, less polluting farming practices can provide lessons for other countries facing similar risks and challenges."

In November 2017, more than 4,000 schools closed in Delhi due to seasonal smog. This smog increases during October and November when fields are burned. It causes major transportation disruptions and poses health risks across northern India, including Delhi, a city of more than 18 million people.
Some of these problems can be resolved by the use of direct sowing technologies in northwestern India.

"Within one year of our dedicated action using about US$75 million under the Central Sector Scheme on 'Promotion of agriculture mechanization for in-situ management of crop residue in the states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and NCT of Delhi,' we could reach 0.8 million hectares of adoption of Happy Seeder/zero tillage technology in the northwestern states of India," said Trilochan Mohapatra, director general of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). "Considering the findings of the Science article as well as reports from thousands of participatory validation trials, our efforts have resulted in an additional direct farmer benefit of US$131 million, compared to a burning option," explained Mohapatra, who is also secretary of India's Department of Agricultural Research and Education.

Rivers and lakes cover just about one percent of Earth's surface, but are home to one third of all vertebrate species worldwide. At the same time, freshwater life is highly threatened. Scientists from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) and international colleagues have now quantified the global decline of big freshwater animals: From 1970 to 2012, global populations of freshwater megafauna declined by 88 percent - twice the loss of vertebrate populations on land or in the ocean. Large fish species are particularly affected. And yet there remain large gaps in monitoring and conservation actions for freshwater megafauna, particularly in areas with high levels of biodiversity.

Freshwater megafauna include all freshwater animals that weigh 30 kilograms or more, such as species of river dolphins, beavers, crocodiles, giant turtles and sturgeons. The scientists compiled available time series data for 126 freshwater megafauna species worldwide, as well as the historical and contemporary geographic distribution data of 44 species in Europe and the USA.

"The results are alarming and confirm the fears of scientists involved in studying and protecting freshwater biodiversity," says Sonja Jähnig, senior author of the study and expert for global change effects on river ecosystems at IGB. From 1970 to 2012, global populations of freshwater megafauna declined by 88 percent, most notably in the Indomalaya (by 99 percent) and Palearctic (by 97 percent) realms - the former covering South and Southeast Asia and southern China, and the latter covering Europe, North Africa and most of Asia. Large fish species such as sturgeons, salmonids and giant catfishes are particularly threatened: with a 94 percent decline, followed by reptiles with 72 percent.

Two main threats: overexploitation and loss of free-flowing rivers

Overexploitation is the primary threat to freshwater megafauna as they are often targeted for meat, skin and eggs. "Furthermore, the decline of large fish species is also attributed to the loss of free-flowing rivers as access to spawning and feeding grounds are often blocked by dams. Although the world's large rivers have already been highly fragmented, another 3700 large dams are planned or under construction - this will exacerbate the river fragmentation even further. More than 800 of these planned dams are located in diversity hotspots of freshwater megafauna, including Amazon, Congo, Mekong and Ganges river basins," says Fengzhi He, first author of the study and expert for diversity patterns and conservation of freshwater megafauna at IGB.

Successful conservation: sturgeons, beavers and the Irrawaddy river dolphin

Thanks to targeted conservation actions, populations of 13 megafauna species including the green sturgeon (Acipenser medirostris) and the American beaver (Castor canadensis) have been stable or even increasing in the USA. In Asia, the population of the Irrawaddy river dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris) in the Mekong basin has increased for the first time in twenty years. In Europe, efficient and large-scale conservation strategies seem to be more difficult to implement, arguably due to politic boarders and differences in environmental awareness among countries. Nevertheless, the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber), for example, has now been reintroduced to many regions where it was extirpated. In Germany, IGB is working with international partners to reintroduce the two formerly native sturgeon species European sturgeon (Acipenser sturio) and Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus) to European waters.

Room for improvement: monitoring and conservation of freshwater biodiversity

Despite that freshwater megafauna are highly threatened, current conservation actions are inadequate for many species. "According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species, over half of all assessed freshwater megafauna species are considered as threatened with extinction. Nonetheless, they receive less research and conservation attention than megafauna in terrestrial or marine ecosystems," reminds Jähnig. The now quantified global decline of freshwater megafauna highlights the urgent need for conservation actions for freshwater biodiversity. It is important to improve the monitoring of population trends and distributions of freshwater species in regions such as Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. After all, changes in abundance and distribution are better indicators of the condition of ecosystems and their living organisms than the extinction of species.

The Magnetospheric Multiscale mission -- MMS -- has spent the past four years using high-resolution instruments to see what no other spacecraft can. Recently, MMS made the first high-resolution measurements of an interplanetary shock.

These shocks, made of particles and electromagnetic waves, are launched by the Sun. They provide ideal test beds for learning about larger universal phenomena, but measuring interplanetary shocks requires being at the right place at the right time. Here is how the MMS spacecraft were able to do just that.

What's in a Shock?

Interplanetary shocks are a type of collisionless shock -- ones where particles transfer energy through electromagnetic fields instead of directly bouncing into one another. These collisionless shocks are a phenomenon found throughout the universe, including in supernovae, black holes and distant stars. MMS studies collisionless shocks around Earth to gain a greater understanding of shocks across the universe.

Interplanetary shocks start at the Sun, which continually releases streams of charged particles called the solar wind.

The solar wind typically comes in two types -- slow and fast. When a fast stream of solar wind overtakes a slower stream, it creates a shock wave, just like a boat moving through a river creates a wave. The wave then spreads out across the solar system. On Jan. 8, 2018, MMS was in just the right spot to see one interplanetary shock as it rolled by.

Catching the Shock

MMS was able to measure the shock thanks to its unprecedentedly fast and high-resolution instruments. One of the instruments aboard MMS is the Fast Plasma Investigation. This suite of instruments can measure ions and electrons around the spacecraft at up to 6 times per second. Since the speeding shock waves can pass the spacecraft in just half a second, this high-speed sampling is essential to catching the shock.

Looking at the data from Jan. 8, the scientists noticed a clump of ions from the solar wind. Shortly after, they saw a second clump of ions, created by ions already in the area that had bounced off the shock as it passed by. Analyzing this second population, the scientists found evidence to support a theory of energy transfer first posed in the 1980s.

MMS consists of four identical spacecraft, which fly in a tight formation that allows for the 3D mapping of space. Since the four MMS spacecraft were separated by only 12 miles at the time of the shock (not hundreds of kilometers as previous spacecraft had been), the scientists could also see small-scale irregular patterns in the shock. The event and results were recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Going Back for More

Due to timing of the orbit and instruments, MMS is only in place to see interplanetary shocks about once a week, but the scientists are confident that they'll find more. Particularly now, after seeing a strong interplanetary shock, MMS scientists are hoping to be able to spot weaker ones that are much rarer and less well understood. Finding a weaker event could help open up a new regime of shock physics.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured this infrared image of Supertyphoon Lekima as it tracked 214 nautical miles southwest of Okinawa, Japan.  Tropical cyclone warning signal #1 is in force for the Luzon provinces of Batanes and Babuyan group of islands.  The storm has tracked north-northwest at 10 knots over the past six hours.

Satellite imagery shows this system continues to rapidly intensify as evidenced by tightly compact central convection which includes an eight nautical mile-sized eye with a tight pinhole in the eye which is an indication of a strong storm.

The supertyphoon is currently producing winds in excess of 130 knots (149 mph).  On the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale that would be a Category 4 hurricane.  With the low vertical wind shear this storm seems well defined and coupled with warm sea surface temperatures of 30 degrees C (86 degrees F) the conditions will most likely allow the storm to continue to intensify.

Supertyphoon Lekima is expected to reach the east coast of China near Taizhou within 48 hours and is expected to sustain the current intensity due to favorable conditions.  Interaction with land, however, will begin to weaken the storm to 60 knots (69 mph) by 72 hours, shortly after it crosses over Shanghai.  At that point the storm will turn north-northwest and rapidly weaken as it continues further inland.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - The most productive places on Earth for solar power are farmlands, according to an Oregon State University study.

The study, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, finds that if less than 1% of agricultural land was converted to solar panels, it would be sufficient to fulfill global electric energy demand. The concept of co-developing the same area of land for both solar photovoltaic power and conventional agriculture is known as agrivoltaics.

"Our results indicate that there's a huge potential for solar and agriculture to work together to provide reliable energy," said corresponding author Chad Higgins, an associate professor in OSU's College of Agricultural Sciences. "There's an old adage that agriculture can overproduce anything. That's what we found in electricity, too. It turns out that 8,000 years ago, farmers found the best places to harvest solar energy on Earth."

The results have implications for the current practice of constructing large solar arrays in deserts, Higgins said.

"Solar panels are finicky," he said. "Their efficiency drops the hotter the panels get. That barren land is hotter. Their productivity is less than what it could be per acre."

For their study, OSU researchers analyzed power production data collected by Tesla, which has installed five large grid-tied, ground-mounted solar electric arrays on agricultural lands owned by Oregon State. Specifically, the team looked at data collected every 15 minutes at the 35th Street Solar Array installed in 2013 on the west side of OSU's Corvallis campus.

The researchers synchronized the Tesla information with data collected by microclimate research stations they installed at the array that recorded mean air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction, soil moisture and incoming solar energy.

Based on those results, Elnaz Hassanpour Adeh, a recent Ph.D. graduate from OSU's water resources engineering program and co-author on the study, developed a model for photovoltaic efficiency as a function of air temperature, wind speed and relative humidity.

"We found that when it's cool outside the efficiency gets better," Higgins said. "If it's hot the efficiency gets worse. When it is dead calm the efficiency is worse, but some wind makes it better. As the conditions became more humid, the panels did worse. Solar panels are just like people and the weather, they are happier when it's cool and breezy and dry."

Using global maps made from satellite images, Adeh then applied that model worldwide, spanning 17 classes of globally accepted land cover, including classes such as croplands, mixed forests, urban and savanna. The classes were then ranked from best (croplands) to worst (snow/ice) in terms of where a solar panel would be most productive.

The model was then re-evaluated to assess the agrivoltaic potential to meet projected global electric energy demand that has been determined by the World Bank.

Higgins and Adeh previously published research that shows that solar panels increase agricultural production on dry, unirrigated farmland. Those results indicated that locating solar panels on pasture or agricultural fields could increase crop yields.

DALLAS (July 23, 2019) - Cues signaling trust and dominance are crucial for social life. Recent research from Dr. Dan Krawczyk's lab at the Center for BrainHealth® explored whether administering two chemically similar hormones known to affect social cognition - oxytocin and vasopressin - would influence the perception of trustworthiness and/or social dominance. This research extended previous studies on the effects of oxytocin, which had inconsistent findings and only explored its influence on perceptions of trustworthiness.

In the study, a group of 20 men observed images of human faces with neutral expressions and rated the levels of trustworthiness and social dominance perceived. They repeated this exercise under three conditions: with oxytocin, with vasopressin and with a saline placebo. The results are published in Psychoneuroendocrinology (April 2019).

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans demonstrated that both hormones affected brain activity across both trustworthiness and dominance, indicating that the hormones have the potential to affect the brain even when the changes do not reach a threshold of observable behavior. Moreover, oxytocin consistently led a perception of greater dominance. This novel finding was also reflected in changes in regions of the brain related to social perception as observed in the fMRI scans.

"This research is important because it grows our understanding of the way people take in social information or social cues," said lead author Dr. Adam Teed, whose 2015 Linda and Joel Robuck Distinguished New Scientist Friends of BrainHealth Award partially funded this research.

Our knowledge of the dwindling sea ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean comes mostly through satellites, which since 1979 have imaged the sea ice from above. The University of Washington's Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean and Modeling System, or PIOMAS, is a leading tool for gauging the thickness of that ice. Until now that system has gone back only as far as 1979.

A new paper now extends the estimate of Arctic sea ice volume back more than a century, to 1901. To do so it used both modern-day computer simulations and historic observations, some written by hand in the early 1900s aboard precursors to today's U.S. Coast Guard ships.

"This extends the record of sea ice thickness variability from 40 years to 110 years, which allows us to put more recent variability and ice loss in perspective," said Axel Schweiger, a sea ice scientist at the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory and first author of the study published in the August issue of the Journal of Climate.

"The volume of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean today and the current rate of loss are unprecedented in the 110-year record," he added.

PIOMAS provides a daily reconstruction of what's happening to the total volume of sea ice across the Arctic Ocean. It combines weather records and satellite images of ice coverage to compute ice volume. It then verifies its results against any existing thickness observations. For years after 1950, that might be fixed instruments, direct measurements or submarines that cruise below the ice.

During the early 20th century, the rare direct observations of sea ice were done by U.S. Revenue cutters, the precursor to the Coast Guard, and Navy ships that have cruised through the Arctic each year since 1879. In the Old Weather project, the UW, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Archives have been working with citizen scientists to transcribe the weather entries in digitized historic U.S. ships' logbooks to recover unique climate records for science. The new study is the first to use the logbooks' observations of sea ice.

"In the logbooks, officers always describe the operating conditions that they were in, providing hourly observations of the sea ice at that time and place," said co-author Kevin Wood, a researcher at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean. If the ship was in open water, the logbook might read "steaming full ahead" or "underway." When the ship encountered ice, officers might write "steering various courses and speeds" meaning the ship was sailing through a field of ice floes. When they found themselves trapped in the ice pack, the log might read "beset."

These logbooks until recently could only be viewed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., but through digital imaging and transcription by Old Weather citizen-scientists these rare observations of weather and sea ice conditions in the Arctic in the late 1800s and early 1900s have been made available to scientists and the public.

"These are unique historic observations that can help us to understand the rapid changes that are taking place in the Arctic today," Wood said.

Wood leads the U.S. portion of the Old Weather project, which originated in 2010 in the U.K. The weather observations from historic logbooks transcribed by Old Weather citizen scientists have already been added to international databases of climate data and were used in the model of the atmosphere that produced the new results.

Officers recorded the ship's position at noon each day using a sextant. They would also note when they passed recognizable features, allowing researchers today to fully reconstruct the ship's route to locate it in space and time.

While the historic sea ice observations have not yet been incorporated directly into the ice model, spot checks between the model and the early observations confirm the validity of the tool.

"This is independent verification that the model is doing the right thing," Schweiger said.

The new, longer record provides more context for big storms or other unusual events and a new way to study the Arctic Ocean sea ice system.

"The observations that we have for sea ice thickness and variability are so limited," Schweiger said. "I think people will start analyzing this record. There's a host of questions that people can ask to help understand Arctic sea ice and predict is future."

The PIOMAS tool is widely used by scientists to monitor the current state of Arctic sea ice. The area of Arctic sea ice over the month of June 2019, and the PIOMAS-calculated volume, were the second-lowest for that time of year since the satellite record began.

The lowest-ever recorded Arctic sea ice area and volume occurred in September 2012. And while Schweiger believes the long-term trend will be downward, he's not placing bets on this year setting a new record.

"The state of the sea ice right now is set up for new lows, but whether it will happen or not depends on the weather over the next two months," Schweiger said.

A new mathematical analysis suggests that migration can generate patterns in the spatial distribution of individuals that promote cooperation and allow populations to thrive, in spite of the threat of exploitation. Felix Funk and Christoph Hauert of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology.

Cooperation between individuals is necessary for production and maintenance of shared resources, such as potable water in human communities or access to nutrients among microbes. However, if too many individuals follow selfish interests, everyone will suffer. Migration of individuals can enhance this social dilemma because defectors can latch onto cooperators or avoid the consequences of their cheating.

The authors of the new study derived mathematical equations that describe how movements that allow individuals to seek cooperation or avoid defection influence this social conflict. They found that different modes of migration can promote or inhibit heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of individuals. When heterogeneous patterns develop, cooperation is promoted and populations thrive.

For instance, when cooperators move toward other cooperators, they can form cooperative communities in which public goods are abundant. However, when defectors chase after cooperators, they can plunder these communities, straining them or causing them to completely fall apart.

The analysis suggests that attempts to avoid defectors are futile and only increase the risk of extinction because cooperators tend to spread themselves thin. Conversely, defectors can generate heterogeneous patterns by avoiding other defectors. To avoid their own kind, defectors move into peripheral areas, allowing cooperative communities to develop.

"Our model was inspired, in particular, by naturally occurring modes of directed migration, such as chemotaxis, which allows microbes to locate attractive regions while steering clear of detrimental ones," Funk says. "Our findings could inform future experimental designs to study the role of migration in the development of antibiotic resistance."

Combining machine learning and robotic precision, researchers present an integrated strategy for computer-augmented chemical synthesis, one that successfully yielded 15 different medicinally related small molecules, they say. Their novel, AI-informed, robotically controlled platform has the potential to greatly improve target-oriented continuously flowing chemical reactions and represents an important step towards fully automated and scalable synthesis of complex molecules. The design and synthesis of complex organic molecules are central to the discovery of useful novel compounds, including small-molecule pharmaceuticals. However, despite advances in laboratory automation, the synthesis of complex organic molecules largely remains a manual process, requiring considerable time and effort from chemists who oversee several labor-intensive steps. As such, an automated platform for chemical synthesis that is capable of both charting synthetic pathways and performing the flow chemistry required to produce large numbers of novel molecules is highly sought. Advancements towards such a system have largely progressed along two parallel tracks; some techniques have shown success in leveraging AI in compound design, while others make use of automated processes in reaction execution and production. Conner Coley and colleagues describe an open-source experimental system that integrates these two techniques. The platform's retrosynthesis algorithm is capable of generalizing millions of previously published reactions and of doing in silico validation, to propose successful synthetic routes. This data, once refined by human chemists, is compiled into reusable chemical "recipes," which are run on a modular flow chemistry platform that uses a robotic arm to automatically reconfigure and set up the unit to carry out the reaction. Coley et al. demonstrate their computer-augmented process by successfully synthesizing 15 different medicinally related small molecules with increasing complexity.

PHILADELPHIA - A crucial signaling pathway that can tell the immune system to fight off cancer can also be co-opted by cancer cells to put the brakes on the immune system, according to a new study from researchers in the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Researchers say this increased understanding can serve as a biomarker that helps predict which patients are likely to respond to immunotherapies. They also show how tipping the balance has potential implications for therapy itself, since blocking the signal in cancer cells helps the immune system fight off tumors in multiple pre-clinical cancer models. The study was published in Cell today.

The study focused on the interferon (IFN) signaling pathway. Interferons normally help activate the immune system to protect cells from viruses and get their name because they literally interfere with a virus' ability to spread. However, IFNs can also put the brakes on the immune system.

"This paradoxical effect has been seen in other diseases - such as chronic viral infections - but our study shows how cancer cells take advantage of the suppressive properties of IFNs to interfere with cancer immunotherapy," said the study's senior author Andy J. Minn, MD, PhD, an associate professor of Radiation Oncology and director of The Mark Foundation Center for Immunotherapy, Immune Signaling, and Radiation at the University of Pennsylvania.

This study builds on previous research from Minn and his team, published in Cell in 2016, which initially identified IFNs as having a role in cancer immunotherapy resistance. For the current study, researchers found when IFNs put a brake on the immune system, cancer cells intercept and manipulate that signal. However, when IFNs are allowed to send signals to the immune system, immune cells are able to do their jobs and kill tumors. Understanding this balance of how IFN signals are routed to immune versus cancer cells could provide a biomarker for whether immunotherapy can be effective.

"If we know the signaling is tilted toward immune cells or toward cancer, we may be able to better predict if a patient is likely to respond," Minn said.

For cases where IFNs signal is stronger in cancer cells, there could be a therapeutic answer. Blocking the signal in tumors would only leave the "go" signal, freeing up the immune system to attack the cancer. That's exactly what happened when researchers tested the theory in pre-clinical models of melanoma, breast, and colorectal cancer treated with immunotherapies like PD-1 inhibitors or CAR T cells.

"IFN signaling exists in the majority of human cancers, so this could end up applying more broadly," Minn said.

The next step is to figure out novel and safe ways to make IFNs' "go" signal stronger, or to block the "stop" signal. A trial testing that second approach in lung cancer patients is already enrolling patients at Penn (NCT03425006).

Using cutting-edge genomics methods a gene signature predicting type 1 diabetes was discovered. This signature is detectable already before the appearance of type 1 diabetes associated autoantibodies. The finding could help in identifying early on the children who are likely to develop the disease later.

The incidence of type 1 diabetes is record high in Finland, but the reason for this is unknown. However, the appearance of autoantibodies associated with type 1 diabetes indicates a likelihood to develop the disease.

An international study led by scientists from the Turku Bioscience Centre at the University of Turku, Finland, identified an early gene signature in children who will later develop type 1 diabetes - even before the appearance of the associated blood autoantibodies.

- Our results provide a starting point for identifying those children who are likely to develop the disease later. Next, we will validate and expand the study in a larger cohort and analyse the role of the signature molecules in the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes. Our goal is to develop tools and means that would enable the prevention of type 1 diabetes, says Academy Professor Riitta Lahesmaa from the University of Turku.

The study involved a long-term international cross-disciplinary collaboration between clinicians, experts in molecular medicine and immunology, and computational scientists.

This new Hubble Space Telescope view of Jupiter, taken on June 27, 2019, reveals the giant planet's trademark Great Red Spot, and a more intense color palette in the clouds swirling in Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere than seen in previous years. The colors, and their changes, provide important clues to ongoing processes in Jupiter's atmosphere.

The bands are created by differences in the thickness and height of the ammonia ice clouds. The colorful bands, which flow in opposite directions at various latitudes, result from different atmospheric pressures. Lighter bands rise higher and have thicker clouds than the darker bands.

Among the most striking features in the image are the rich colors of the clouds moving toward the Great Red Spot, a storm rolling counterclockwise between two bands of clouds. These two cloud bands, above and below the Great Red Spot, are moving in opposite directions. The red band above and to the right (northeast) of the Great Red Spot contains clouds moving westward and around the north of the giant tempest. The white clouds to the left (southwest) of the storm are moving eastward to the south of the spot.

All of Jupiter's colorful cloud bands in this image are confined to the north and south by jet streams that remain constant, even when the bands change color. The bands are all separated by winds that can reach speeds of up to 400 miles (644 kilometers) per hour.

On the opposite side of the planet, the band of deep red color northeast of the Great Red Spot and the bright white band to the southeast of it become much fainter. The swirling filaments seen around the outer edge of the red super storm are high-altitude clouds that are being pulled in and around it.

The Great Red Spot is a towering structure shaped like a wedding cake, whose upper haze layer extends more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) higher than clouds in other areas. The gigantic structure, with a diameter slightly larger than Earth's, is a high-pressure wind system called an anticyclone that has been slowly downsizing since the 1800s. The reason for this change in size is still unknown.

A worm-shaped feature located below the Great Red Spot is a cyclone, a vortex around a low-pressure area with winds spinning in the opposite direction from the Red Spot. Researchers have observed cyclones with a wide variety of different appearances across the planet. The two white oval-shaped features are anticyclones, like small versions of the Great Red Spot.

Another interesting detail is the color of the wide band at the equator. The bright orange color may be a sign that deeper clouds are starting to clear out, emphasizing red particles in the overlying haze.

The new image was taken in visible light as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy program, or OPAL. The program provides yearly Hubble global views of the outer planets to look for changes in their storms, winds and clouds.

Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed Jupiter when the planet was 400 million miles from Earth, when Jupiter was near "opposition" or almost directly opposite the Sun in the sky.

August 7, 2019 --

Imagine a new breed of pirate not only able to sail the high seas, but to exploit nearly any mode of transportation without detection. And these raiders' ambitions have little to do with amassing treasure and everything to do with hijacking ecosystems.

Today's invasive species are as tenacious and resilient as the pirates of yesteryear, and when these plunderers set foot in new locations around the world, they know how to make themselves at home. As a result, home will never be the same for many native residents.

Virginia Tech researchers have discovered that when invasive plants take root, native animals pay the price.

Jacob Barney, associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, graduate researcher Becky Fletcher, and a team of five other doctoral students conducted the first-ever comprehensive meta-analytic review examining the ecological impacts of invasive plants by exploring how animals - indigenous and exotic - respond to these nonnative plants. Their study, which took place over a two-year period, is published in the journal Global Change Biology.

"Individual studies are system-specific, but we wanted to look for commonalities about how animals respond to invasive species. Our findings suggest that the impacts of invasive plants are much worse than we thought," said Barney. "Exotic animals' ability to survive on invasive plants coupled with the reduction of native animals is almost a worst-case scenario."

The team's findings underscore the negative impact of invasive plant species on native animal populations - populations that include worms, birds, and a host of mammals and other vertebrates - all of whom serve a multitude of important ecosystem functions across a range of trophic levels. Only mollusks and arthropods were unaffected.

"We had reason to believe that native and exotic animals may respond differently to invasive plants," said Fletcher, a Kansas City native who is completing her doctorate in invasive plant ecology, and the paper's lead author. "We hypothesized that exotic plants may increase the abundance of exotic animals while reducing the abundance of native animals."

As it turns out, invasive plants had no impact on the abundance of exotic animals. The plants do not facilitate exotic animals, nor do they harm them. In essence, nonnative flora provides sufficient nourishment and other benefits to uphold, if not to enlarge, nonnative animal populations. On the other hand, native animals are diminishing as invasive plants gain a foothold in their habitats.

Gourav Sharma, Ariel Heminger, and Cody Dickinson hold an array of beautiful, though invasive, plant species, including Queen Anne's lace, spotted knapweed, butterfly bush, tree-of-heaven, Amur honeysuckle, Amur maple, and Japanese barberry. Collectively, invasive species - plants, animals, and diseases - cause an estimated $120 billion in damages each year.

"Invasive species are one of the five drivers of global change. Just as human-induced phenomena, such as land use disturbance, climate change, and disease, are re-shaping our ecosystems, the same is true for invasive plants and animals," said Barney, who is also a fellow in the Fralin Life Sciences Institute and an affiliate of the Global Change Center. "Our world will witness even more invasions over time. So, we must understand the body of research because it will drive conservation efforts."

As a result of human activity, invasive plant and animal species now encircle the planet, colonizing terrestrial, aquatic, and marine environments, and suffusing every ocean and continent. In addition to their ability to displace native plants and animals, invasive species reduce wildlife habitat and alter natural processes. These environmental damages are often amplified by cascading impacts on other associated species and systems, including deforestation, storm water runoff, reduced groundwater, increased risk of wildfires, and the introduction of pathogens. Such sweeping losses also reap severe economic repercussions. While invasive insects cost the agricultural industry $13 billion in crops annually, collectively, invasive species - plants, animals, and diseases - cause an estimated $120 billion in damages each year in the United States alone.

A worst-case scenario feared by some researchers is invasion meltdown, which hypothesizes that once an exotic species - plant or animal - becomes abundant in an area, the ecosystem may change in such a way that facilitates the establishment of additional invaders. While Barney's study was not designed to test invasion meltdown, the scenario is not so far-fetched.

"In the context of biodiversity, we are worried about the impact invasive species are having on diversity and ecosystems," said Fletcher.

The researchers cite studies showing that native cardinals nesting in invasive Lonicera maackii shrubs fledged 20 percent fewer offspring. The team also discovered that animals in wet ecosystems were more impacted than in dry ecosystems. Rivers, already more nutrient-rich than terrestrial systems, are subject to frequent and intense disruptions such as flooding that can flow debris, seeds, and vegetation to new locales.

"As a result of climate change and land-use disturbance, species homogenization is the new normal," said Barney, pointing out another challenge for researchers. "So, identifying nativity, the place a plant or animal has long existed, is becoming much harder. We need to document what is native versus exotic in every system as this will better inform our understanding of the effects of invasive plants."

This information, coupled with better taxonomic identification of the animals impacted by invasive plants, could shed light on whether invasive species are the arbiters of global change or merely the victims.

"For 20 years, I've conducted experiments on individual species to learn about them," said Barney. "This was the first time I've been able to do a large-scale study looking at big picture consequences. This approach was refreshing and allowed us to ask questions that have larger implications and look at larger trends. Working with six Ph.D. students was also a nice team effort. We coordinated well and approached this as a team of equals."

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Electromagnetic fields might help prevent some breast cancers from spreading to other parts of the body, new research has found.

The study showed that low intensity electromagnetic fields hindered the mobility of specific breast cancer cells by preventing the formation of long, thin extensions at the edge of a migrating cancer cell. The research was done on cells in a lab, and the concept hasn't yet been tested in animals or humans. The study was published today in the journal Communications Biology.

"A cancer cell has a tendency to do the most destructive thing imaginable," said Jonathan Song, lead author of the study. Song is an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University and a member of the molecular biology and cancer genetics program at Ohio State's Comprehensive Cancer Center.

That ability to not only proliferate locally but spread throughout the body is what makes cancer so devastating -- and what prompted the research team to examine individual cancer cells to understand what makes them so harmful, Song said.

"One very destructive thing these cells do is migrate to distant areas of the body," he said. "And what we learned here is that it seems by treating them with a certain class of electric field we are altering their potential to spread somehow."

The research team, which included engineers and cancer biologists, found that cancer cells appeared to sense both the presence of the electromagnetic fields, and also the direction from which the fields were coming.

To study these effects, the researchers built an instrument called a Helmholz coil that allowed them to apply uniform electromagnetic energy to different types of breast cancer cells. In addition, the researchers engineered an apparatus that enabled them to track continuously the trajectories of migrating breast cancer cells while viewing them under a microscope. This apparatus, Song said, "recreates and mimics what actually happens in the body in a controllable environment that we can easily test and observe." Their goal was to see if and how the cells responded to that energy, and what role electromagnetic fields might play in treating breast cancer in the future.

They found that metastatic triple-negative breast cancer cells -- cancer cells that, by their nature, do not respond to hormonal therapy or to treatments that target a gene commonly expressed in breast cancer cells -- were the most sensitive to electromagnetic fields.

And, in their tests, they found that certain drug therapies -- and specifically one that targets a pathway for cancer called AKT -- could enhance the ability of the electromagnetic fields to block the cancer cells from spreading.

Because this research took place in a laboratory using a model the researchers designed to mimic the environment in which breast cancer cells form, the consequences of these findings for patients are still to be validated.

"But what we showed, biologically, is that these cancer cells are becoming profoundly less metastatic, which is a very important finding," Song said.

Their findings represent a significant step for researchers working to isolate the ways cancer cells couple with other cells and spread. Song said future research could expand to test electromagnetic fields and targeted molecular therapies in mice and, if those tests prove promising, to humans.

TAMPA, Fla. - Lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States, with squamous cell lung cancer (SCC) being one of the common types. Despite improved knowledge of the molecular alterations in SCC, little is understood about how the alterations contribute to the development of the cancer and how potential vulnerabilities could be exploited to treat the disease. Researchers in Moffitt Cancer Center's Lung Cancer Center of Excellence took a closer look at SCC tumors to determine if their characteristics had an impact on patient outcomes. The findings were published today in Nature Communications.

The research team performed extensive analysis on 108 SCC tumor samples from Moffitt's Total Cancer Care® Protocol. This analysis included copy number alterations, DNA mutations, RNA and protein expression patterns, and pathology. They determined that the SCC tumors could be grouped into 3 main subtypes based on their protein expression patterns. Those subtypes were termed inflamed, redox and mixed.

The inflamed subtype accounted for 40% of the tumor tissue. Those samples had higher levels of proteins associated with immune cells, especially neutrophils or myeloid cells, and an active inflammatory response. Based on RNA data, the researchers discovered that the inflamed subtype also had a high proportion of other immune cells, including memory B-cells and monocytes, and was associated with higher levels of PD-1 than the other two subtypes.

The redox subtype was noted in 47% of the tumors. The specimens were characterized by higher levels of proteins that are associated with oxidation-reduction cellular signaling pathways. The redox subtype also had a higher number of genetic and chromosomal alterations that are known to be involved in SCC development. Using these data as guides, they identified new vulnerabilities that could be possible future therapeutic targets.

The final subtype, the mixed group, represented 13% of the tumors and only displayed an increased level of four proteins. The researchers did not find any significant chromosomal alterations in this subtype but did learn that the mixed group had more mutations in the APC gene and had a greater infiltration of stromal cells than the other subtypes.

The analysis showed that the three subtypes did not correspond to better or worse patient outcomes. However, tertiary lymph node structures, more commonly found in the inflamed subtype, were associated with better outcomes.

"These findings are in line with the general lack of agreement of prognostic signatures in SCC but now strongly suggest that an active immune response, indicated by tertiary lymph node structures, is associated with better outcomes. We hope to better understand this in future studies and determine how to exploit this knowledge for new therapy," said Eric Haura, M.D., director of Lung Cancer Center of Excellence and interim chair of the Department of Thoracic Oncology at Moffitt.

The researcher team hopes that their results will lead to an improved understanding of SCC and highlight potential therapeutic targets for each subtype. Ongoing studies are examining metabolic targets for treatment of the redox group.

"Our results show SCC can be thought of as a disease with three subtypes, the bulk (87%) of which are associated with either immune infiltration (inflamed) or oxidation-reduction (redox) biology. This line of thinking is compelling, because it indicates that the majority of patients could benefit from therapies directed against immune cell types (inflamed) or metabolic modulation of tumor intrinsic pathways (redox)," Haura added.